Professional Cooling

Professional Cooling

In recent times, ATI has been continually pushing the envelope. They may not have the fastest graphics card in their stable, but their newest offerings have always made significant progress over its predecessors. Take the newly released Radeon HD 4770 for example - it is the world's first GPU to be manufactured using a 40nm process. This is even more impressive when you consider that all of ATI's current line-up of GPUs are 55nm ones and NVIDIA, quite embarrassingly, still has 65nm GPUs still in circulation.

But that's not all. ATI's newest flagship is the Radeon HD 4890, which is essentially a super-overclocked Radeon HD 4870, and it made headlines by being the first GPU to ever clock in excess of 1GHz for the core. And although that did not make the Radeon HD 4890 the fastest single GPU in the world (that honor belongs to the GeForce GTX 285), but it did create much buzz and excitement, allowing ATI to steal the limelight, if only for a moment.

We reviewed the Radeon HD 4890 and thought that it offered decent improvements over the older Radeon HD 4870, but at the cost of higher power consumption and noisier operation - the fan was clearly working hard to keep the card cool. Now, however, we have the PCS+ Radeon HD 4890 Battle Forge Edition (PCS+ HD 4890 BF Edition) from PowerColor's PCS+ (Professional Cooling System) line of cards and it features a custom cooler optimized by cooling specialist ZEROtherm. A standard Radeon HD 4890 runs at 70 degrees Celsius, but that's with the fan whirring away like mad, hence it'll be intriguing to see how the custom PCS cooler will perform.